texas

As you can imagine, things like the so-called “bathroom bill” drive me crazy. It also makes me sad for whatever happened to my fellow Texans, who support it, that they’d be this cruel, uninformed, and ignorant. And, of course, there’s the people effected.

Stealing some of Matt Ray’s notes for our Software Defined Talk recording, here’s a notebook and highlights on the topic.

“The consequences of this bill are beyond severe. Not only can transgender people be arrested and jailed for using the bathroom, but they will be assumed to be pedophiles, and be put on the Texas sexual predator watch list. So not only is there the possibility of being hauled off to jail during a conference, the arrest will ruin the rest of your life. Just because you need to pass some water.”

More: “The differences on the bathroom bill are substantial. The Senate would require transgender Texans to use the restrooms in publicly owned buildings that match their biological sex and would bar local governments from adopting or maintaining their own laws on the subject. The House version would apply only to elementary and secondary schools; after it passed last weekend, Patrick and others criticized it as a change that does very little.”

How’d it go in North Carolina?

AP analysis of economic effect in North Carolina, from March 2017:
Losses of $313m a year – “$3.76 billion in lost business over a dozen years.”
Some examples, not just bleeding-heart tech companies: “Those include PayPal canceling a 400-job project in Charlotte, CoStar backing out of negotiations to bring 700-plus jobs to the same area, and Deutsche Bank scuttling a plan for 250 jobs in the Raleigh area. Other companies that backed out include Adidas, which is building its first U.S. sports shoe factory employing 160 near Atlanta rather than a High Point site, and Voxpro, which opted to hire hundreds of customer support workers in Athens, Georgia, rather than the Raleigh area.”
Most of it is from businesses like Paypal and Deutsche Bank pulling out – good for them!

“Bank of America CEO Brian Moynihan — who leads the largest company based in North Carolina — said he’s spoken privately to business leaders who went elsewhere with projects or events because of the controversy, and he fears more decisions like that are being made quietly.”

For context, The North Carolina economy: “In 2010 North Carolina’s total gross state product was $424.9 billion. In 2011 the civilian labor force was at around 4.5 million with employment near 4.1 million. The working population is employed across the major employment sectors.”

So, rough estimate of economic impact is: a decrease of 0.07%/year (this is a bad number since it’s based on 2010 GDP and other forward looking estimates, however, it gives you a ball-park sense.) However, see scenario for larger impact for the future below (I mean, not to mention being a dick-heads and treating people as subhuman for no good reason other than being fucking social-idiots):

For Toyota, this means something on the order of 1,000 new jobs in Texas, with an estimated 2,800 existing employees who’ll move to Texas. That’s a lot of new HEB customers, home buyers, and taxpayers.

Now, think of other G2000 companies that would want to move to Texas, or beef up their existing presence. The companies will be deciding what to do in the next 2-3 years, and if they skip on Texas, that will be decades of lost cash, not to mention new Texans.

Why in the first place?

So, what’s the big deal for those in favor of it in the first place? Well, obviously, the idea that there’s “wide-stances” going on is bunk (more).

One can only conclude that supporters are confused (and, thus, afraid): there’s a fundamental disagreement about gender and sexuality. But, also, there’s just downright discriminatory. We’ve lived through this before with the gay marriage movement int he past 20 years and know how to spot veiled discrimination.

As one ACLU person put it: “that fundamentally [supporters of bathroom bills] just don’t think of transgender people as humans, and they try to erase trans people from existence.””

The Economist describes the people effected: ‘The heart of the bill is its concept of “biological sex”; lawmakers define it as “the physical condition of being male or female, which is stated on a person’s birth certificate”. This definition is fraught for several reasons. First, as many as 1 in 1,500 babies are born with ambiguous genitalia that qualify them as “intersex”, though that designation was only used for the first time last week, when a Brooklyn-born, 55-year-old California resident received a revised birth certificate from New York City in the mail. Second, thousands of the 1.4m transgender Americans have had sex-reassignment surgery, which means that many people who were designated as male or female at birth now have “the physical condition” of being another gender. And for transgender people who retain the biological markers of their original gender identification (because they choose not to undergo surgery or cannot afford it), the fact of their sense of themselves remains. Many transgender women and men feel not only uncomfortable but endangered when being forced to use a bathroom that does not mesh with their identity. In a 2013 paper, Jody Herman, a scholar at the UCLA law school’s Williams Institute, discussed a survey finding that 70% of transgender people “reported being denied access, verbally harassed, or physically assaulted in public restrooms”.’ (More from CNN.)

Is there anything to actually worry about? The article continues: “No similar research bears out the theory that opening bathrooms to transgender people spurs sexual predators to put on lipstick and a dress to target women and young girls in public facilities. Last year, a coalition of organisations dedicated to preventing the abuse of women issued a letter addressing Mr Patrick’s worry. “As rape crisis centers, shelters, and other service providers who work each and every day to meet the needs of all survivors and reduce sexual assault and domestic violence throughout society”, they wrote, “we speak from experience and expertise when we state that these claims are false”. Texas Republicans say that strict gender segregation in public bathrooms is “common sense”, but their appeal to conventional wisdom is not borne out by the evidence. A police department official in Des Moines, Iowa, said he doubts that bathroom tolerance for trans people would “encourage” illicit behaviour. Sex offenders, he said, will find victims “no matter what the laws are”.”

Meanwhile, bathroom bill thinking shows a misunderstanding of the realities of sexual assault: ‘[Laura Palumbo, communications director at the National Sexual Violence Resource Center] said she believes people “must understand the facts about sexual assault,” adding that in 8 out of 10 cases the victim already knows the person who sexually assaulted them, citing Justice Department statistics. However, 64 percent of transgender people will experience sexual assault in their lifetime, she said, citing a study by the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force and National Center for Transgender Equality.’

All of this said, other than “there is no evidence,” it’s surprisingly hard to find any numbers and reports on the topic of “is this actually a problem,” based on past crime and incidents. This is true for both sides of the issues!

That said, the conclusion would, thus, be that there’s no evidence based on historics that there’s anything close to a material, actual problem (sexual assault) going on here. This is not only intellectually (and socially) frustrating, but it also means that all the effort spent on bathroom bills is wasted and should have been spent on fixing real problems that could prevent actual sexual assault.

HEB is the mega grocery chain, operating in much of Texas. It’s a sort of “mini-globalism” for them to sell globally. A lot of the local, in store brands they have are the kinds of things people visiting home would stock up on when they went back north or abroad, so there’s probably a good market for shipping. Also, I’ve always heard that they’re so big that they can control distribution and pricing of things regionally, like soda, so maybe they can get prices low enough. Also: they’re private, so no annoying shareholders to please, I guess.

Roth gave Abbott, accompanied by state Sen. Donna Campbell and U.S. Rep. Lamar Smith, a lengthy tour of Amazon’s new fulfillment center in this San Antonio suburb, an immense facility measuring 1.25 million square feet, or the size of 59 football fields. The distribution hub houses tens of thousands of products that are shipped out to the San Antonio area and beyond.

Amazon, which has invested more than $400 million in Texas since 2012, employs nearly 500 people at the facility and more than 3,000 across Texas. The other two fulfillment centers are in the Dallas-Fort Worth area.

While I’m not in Austin at the moment – but in DFW – it’s remarkable that the weather has suddenly cooled down. Talking about the weather is always boring, but when Summer is an endless chain of 100 degree days, it’s on the top of everyone’s mind.

People often make fun of us Texans for not being able to handle snow and ice. Indeed, down in Austin if someone spills a glass of water on a bridge in Feburary, the while city shuts down for our floating holiday: ice-day.

But, we can cope with the heat. This year has been one of the hottest, I hear. But, it’s not like any Summer I’ve lived through in Austin has been “mild.” They’re always miserable.

Going outside now, though, you can feel Fall coming on. The kind of weather where you have to sleep with a thin blanket and you make fun of people wearing shorts. Maybe even a hoodie once the sun goes down.